How things have changed inside the 4 seater

Yesterday I took the wife and the F-car to MYF here in San Diego telling her we were going to “look at something”. Actually I had pre-arranged for an intro flight and first lesson. I picked a flight school that operated Cirrus for that purpose rather than the 172 I first flew in. She loved it. I decided not to ride along so as not to make her unnecessarily nervous.

While I was waiting for her to return, one of the owners asked me if I wanted to take a walk to a nearby hangar to see a new SR GTS (Turbo) they just bought.

I flew my own 182TRG for some years back in the day, but even then was basically a low hour weekend private. I haven’t flown except as a big jet passenger for years. The SR22 was actually the first “modern” 4 seater I had been in. I have to say it was an almost alien experience. I really liked the cockpit design and found it inviting and with the sidestick, unexpectedly spacious. This Cirrus was equipped with both the “Perspective Enhanced Vision System” and the Avidyne , a form of infrared vision, and even XM Radio and A/C(!)

The CFI ran me through some of the avionics functions and I have to say I was somewhat overwhelmed with how things have changed inside the cockpit. When I told him just that and said that it sure looked different from what I learned in and had flown, he agreed, smiling when he spoke (not entirely kindly) of aircraft with “steam gauges”. That stung a little bit.

Thinking about it since, I have to agree there are a lot of advantages to the glass cockpit, but maybe one or two disadvantages. That may be due more to my ignorance than anything else, but the thought did occur to me it might be a little difficult flying partial panel when you have a computer failure. And seems to me that the instruments in the display can still be path traced back to the very much the same devices that fed input to those “steam gauges”.

I’m not sure whether I would enjoy piloting one of the SR22 generation as much as my old Cessna, but I do know sure as heck a lot of things would be different.